


Red

by drunkbedelia



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: F/F, Mention of sex, mention of violence, vague horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-23
Updated: 2021-01-23
Packaged: 2021-03-15 20:13:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28944237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drunkbedelia/pseuds/drunkbedelia
Summary: A self-indulgent character exploration of the Handler through the queer villain trope--She tells me that she will break my heart.She says it with a smile, with red lips and bared teeth. Her coat collar is raised, stiff, against her neck, and it digs into her throat as she leans close.‘Would you mind?’
Relationships: The Handler/OC
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12





	Red

She tells me that she will break my heart.

She says it with a smile, with red lips and bared teeth. Her coat collar is raised, stiff, against her neck, and it digs into her throat as she leans close.

‘Would you mind?’

She is pointing at the fanned pile of napkins. I don’t know if she’s asking about them or her promise. I pass her a napkin. She dabs the corners of her mouth carefully. Her drink is a dark brown but under the dim lights it is red, too. The more I look the more she is red, the colour splashing across everything else, and when she licks her lips I think she must be drunk, she must be acting on a dare, but she’s hardly touched her drink and we’re alone at the bar and she’s looking at me with intent.

She invites me home from the bar and the sex is good, mostly, except for when she speaks in the middle of it, her voice curled and practiced, a performance, and my stomach goes taught with embarrassment. Afterwards I dress to leave but she grabs me with quick hands. You can’t go yet, she says, and her eyes glimmer in half moonlight.

The next morning she says she has to work, she sits on the bed with her hair stiff and her lips still drawn red, and I wonder when she made up her face. I ask her what her work is.

‘I get in the way,’ she says. She kisses me on the lips and I taste her red and it surprises me, sour as lemon. I had expected blood.

She takes a pleasure in destruction, I learn, over the weeks we spend together. We watch a documentary about wild foxes. When the mother eats one of her young, the one that came out weak and mangled, she throws her head back. I think she is upset, and I reach for her hand, but a sound comes from her throat and I realise she is laughing.

We go to the art market on the weekend and she fits right in with her oversized broach and red heels but when I point this out she does not seem to understand. I spend some time at a stall selling painted vases, thinking she might like one, but suddenly she’s not beside me. I find her at a table of jewelry near the back. The man behind the counter is shouting, holding something in his hand.

‘You broke it!’ He screams, ‘Crazy bitch broke it!’ and he is not holding anything but his crumpled hand, the fingers hanging limp, like a puppet’s. I turn away. She is watching like the man’s rage is something to buy, along with his faux gems and chains, though his watering eyes are fixed on her.

‘An accident,’ she says as the man’s words dissolve into a low, continuous wail. He dropped the display lid on himself, she explains. ‘I was going to buy that necklace, there, but he couldn’t part with it.’

I look at the necklace under the glass. It is a gold chain with a large pendant formed in the shape of some arthropodal creature, its many legs sprawled flat beneath a painted exoskeleton. As I stare the legs seem to multiply, crowding under the metal shell, pushing and pulsing with each new appendage.

She laughs at my expression, her eyes opaque. Her lips are taught against her teeth, red on bone.

‘Doesn’t it bother you?’ One of my friends asks one night, when we’re out for drinks. She is not there, busy with work. ‘She seems kind of…’

Horrible, weird, evil, soulless, an asshole. Dangerous. They all make their suggestions. I bat them away. You don’t know her, I tell them. They ask, Do you?

The night she tries to kill me it is our one year anniversary and we have fought about nothing and then made up, as we often do, in bed, our anger with each other turning to heat and touch and a cathartic, unspoken forgiveness. She is lying beside me in the dark when I feel the metal on my back. 

‘A promise made,’ she says. 

I roll over to face her. The gun pushes into my ribcage. I ask her why.

You’re in the way, she says.

Of what?

She is mostly shadow, and this close I see only red lips, black eyes. ‘We end up alone. Or dead.’

‘I can just leave,’ I say. ‘If you don’t want me anymore.’

‘Leave?’ 

‘It’s what most people do.’

She is silent for a moment. Then the pressure of the gun lifts. I hear her place it back in her drawer.

I leave the next morning. I don’t contact her again. Enough time passes that I stop thinking of her, and then she’s just a flicker in my memory, inconsequential. A few years later, I hear she died. A shot to the head. I imagine the blood trickling from the wound, staining her lips.

I find an old tube of lipstick in my drawer. It’s hers, I realise, left behind and forgotten. I twist it and draw it over my mouth. Red.

I bare my teeth.


End file.
